Yves Engler- The Black
Book of Canadian Foreign Policy

Mr Engler is a Montrealer of
Jewish descent who gained some notoriety by being connected to a protest
against the appearance of Benjamin Netanyahu at Concordia University on
September 9, 2002. The planned speech by Netanyahu was interrupted by
demonstrators and resulted in the removal of Engler from his position as VP
of the students union by a student tribunal on the grounds of “vexatious
conduct.”

Engler views his task as that of
disabusing Canadians of their conviction that we are a force for good in the
world, that we play a positive role, that we are well liked around the
planet. He lists a very large number of countries where our government, and
sometimes our military, acted in the interests of either the British
colonial power or the US Empire or Canadian banks and mining companies.
There are eight chapters and each is followed by at least a hundred
footnotes. He has a bibliography of about three hundred books as well.

Haiti became a target of the
“policy to protect” doctrine of the Liberal government of Jean Chrétien. At
a meeting Meech lake on January 31 and February 1, 2003 between France, the
US and Canada it was decided that the democratically elected government of
Jean-Bertrand Aristide “must go”. On February 29, 2004 our JTF2 troops
secured the airport from which Aristide was deported to the Central African
Republic by US Marines. In the 22 months following his overthrow there were
8,00 murders and 35,000 rapes with half of the killings committed by
governmental or anti-Aristide forces. The Haitian police were particularly
brutal and our soldiers and police trainers often supported them. We
supplied tens of millions of dollars of aid to the installed government,
paid the salary of the Justice Minister, built a police academy for $25
million and contracted training of the police to a private company for
another $15 million. The police commanders all have a military background
and with the Haitian National Police now under the control of the nation’s
elites, democratic processes are going to be scarce, as subsequent
fraudulent elections proved.

To the question as to why we
helped to remove Aristide, Engler states that it was to “make good with
Washington”. He quotes Foreign Affairs Minister Bill Graham: “Foreign
Affairs view was there is a limit to how much we can constantly say no to
the political masters in Washington. All we had was Afghanistan to wave. On
every other file we are offside. Eventually we came onside on Haiti, so we
got another arrow in our quiver.” Engler also asserts that the doubling of
the Haitian minimum wage from the equivalent of one dollar to two was
opposed by domestic and international capital which used Haiti’s low wages
as a club to beat back wage increases in other Latin countries. A Canadian
garment manufacturer was particularly pleased that his 8,000 workers were
brought under control.

As in Haiti so in the Dominican
Republic where Lyndon Johnson landed 23,000 US Marines to prevent the freely
elected President, Juan Bosch from taking power. Two years earlier Bosch had
shown too much accommodation with leftists and was removed by the military.
Lester Pearson told Parliament that “the United States government has
intervened in the Dominican Republic for the protection of its own citizens
and those of other countries.” A Canadian warship was sent to Santo Domingo
by Paul Hellyer “in case it was required.” Pearson expressed concern for the
assets of Falconbridge Nickel and the Royal and Nova Scotia banks as well.
After Bosch was removed and replaced by the US backed Joaquin Balaguer
government, Dominican troops were used to remove

union
organizers and supporters from the mine, to break up union meetings, to beat
upsome workers and arrest
others. The President of Falconbridge openly expressed hisgratitude to
Balaguer. The anti –union activities continued in this, the largest foreign
investment in the nation.

On Cuba Engler describes the
large operations of our banks for decades preceding the Batista regime.
Diefenbaker backed the Bay of Pigs invasion and said that the events in Cuba
were “manifestations of a dictatorship which is abhorrent to free men
everywhere.” Our relations with Castro were maintained at the urging of the
US because they felt that Canada would be well positioned to gather
intelligence on the island. In the missile crisis of 1963 our supply of
military information was especially useful.

The chapter on Central and South
America details similar Canadian behaviour in Mexico, Guyana, Ecuador, Peru,
Bolivia, Guatemala, El Salvador, Nicaragua, Panama, Costa Rica, Brazil,
Chile, Columbia and Venezuela. This last nation is a continuing target of
the US and for this reason Canada made no comment about the attempted coup
in April, 2002 which was condemned by all Latin nations. We favour Columbia
even though its human rights record is atrocious. In the recent military
overthrow of the democratically elected president of Honduras (not mentioned
in the book), the US did not challenge the military and we went along.

Canada’s peacekeeping reputation
was formed in 1957 when Lester Pearson came to the aid of our allies,
Britain, France and the US who were in dispute over the invasion of Egypt by
the former two with the aid of Israel, an attack repudiated by Eisenhower
who saw it as an opening for Soviet influence in the middle-east. Our
government did not disagree with the obviously illegal invasion which was,
at least partly, intended to reclaim the Suez Canal. Prime Minister Louis St
Laurent said: “The Egyptian action introduced a threat to the trade on which
the economic life of many countries depends.” The UN force allowed a face
saving exit by Britain and France and patched up a dispute between NATO
members but also prevented Nasser from carrying out nationalistic reforms.
When, ten years later the UNEF was asked to leave, the UN secretary General
agreed but Ottawa objected. Paul Martin, Secretary of State for External
Affairs, argued that “in giving its consent to the establishment of the
force the Egyptian government accepted a limitation of its sovereignty and
that it is now the prerogative of the United Nations rather than the
UAR(Egyptian) government to determine when the United Nations force has
completed its task.” A world-wide campaign, led by the US and Britain,
tried to overturn the UN decision to withdraw, this in spite of the
fact that Egyptian agreement was necessary in the first instance for its
entry.

In the current war with Iraq,
although we did not, nominally, participate, our exchange military personnel
were allowed to fight. It is also reported that JTF2 was active in Iraq and
members of JTF2 also left to join private security contractors. Ambassador
Paul Cellucci said “Ironically, the Canadians indirectly provide more
support for us in Iraq than most of those 46 countries that are fully
supporting us. It’s kind of an odd situation.”

Engler has an excellent review of
the part played by Pearson, an avowed Zionist and by Supreme Court Justice
Ivan Rand in the UN decision to partition Palestine. He suspects the
decision was, at least in part, urged by the desire to find a home, other
than Canada, for the displace Jews of Europe. A second motive was to have a
western outpost in the middle-east. The earlier notions of a federated State
of Palestine with some semblance of democracy, was abandoned and the fate of
almost a million displaced Palestinians was not a concern to Canada, which
it is not to this day.

As with South America, he also
describes our activities in Asia- China, Viet Nam, Indonesia, Papua New
Guinea, Korea, Philippines, India, Mongolia and Afghanistan.

Another chapter looks at the
African countries where we were players- Congo, Nigeria, Ghana, Tanzania,
South Africa, Niger, Sudan, Algeria and Somalia. Using Preston’s book as a
reference, he mentions the fact that in the late nineteenth century Britain
offered one military commission annually to the Royal Military College;
Sergeant HC Freer served with distinction in Britain’s quest to control
Egypt. Other ex-cadets were helping out with railway construction, commanded
an artillery division for General Smuts, and commanded Royal Engineers in
West Africa. Another ex-cadet, William Stairs from Halifax, led a mission of
1,950 men to capture the Katanga mining region for the Belgian King Leopold
II. Stairs was an extreme racist whose barbarity is self-exposed in a diary
in which he noted: “this morning I cut off the heads of two [Wasangora] men
[we shot last night] and placed them on poles one at each exit from the bush
into the plantation.” He later wrote: “every male native capable of using
the bow [and arrow] is shot, this of course we must do. All the children and
women are taken as slaves by our men to do work in the camps.” Canadian
Senator WJ MacDonald moved “a parliamentary resolution expressing
satisfaction for Stair’s manly conduct.” Britain preferred that Belgium and
its king control the Congo rather than France which explains Stairs work
with Leopold II.

His section on Afghanistan
reveals the extent of private sector business in this operation. The
contracts are all cost plus three percent administration plus one percent
profit plus an eligibility for an eight percent performance enhancement fee.
The base at Kandahar is a joint SNC-US based PAE ten year contract for $700
million. CIDA is spending very large amounts on other private companies
doing a variety of civil construction tasks. This war has been an
opportunity to spend huge un-tendered amounts for various types of hardware
whose need was “urgent”, from tanks to large lift helicopters and planes.

As a personal note, I asked
Laurie Hawn, Peter MacKay’s Parliamentary secretary, why we were buying some
particular helicopter for delivery in 2013 when we would no longer be in
Afghanistan. He replied with some quite irrelevant quip.

Militarization is now a fact in
Canada as it has been in the US since the Korean War. Manson’s article in
the Toronto Star is now instructing us to listen to what the elites tell
us. He writes in the form of FAQ’s (a common trick to avoid embarrassing
questions and to preset the agenda) but nowhere does he say what this piece
of machinery designed in the 80’s to counter Soviet radar is going to be
used for by us. What future enemy will possess the sophisticated radar
systems this plane can escape? Nor does he say what other machines have been
evaluated. He claims that the F-18’s will have serious structural problems
by 2017 yet this is a metal plane as is the still flying seventy year old
DC-3, the fifty year old B-52 and the similar aged Russian Bear (with
propeller engines and our number one worry). No mention that the JTF has an
operating radius of 1,100 km and will need aerial refuelling, that its
payload is small, that most of the cost is for features of no use to us,
that the carbon fibre composite construction is easily degraded by
sunlight.

His piece is a lecture from an
elite possessing superior knowledge and experience and our duty is to accept
the addition of another twenty billion to our debt without a whimper. It
would be less galling to hear this from someone who has not lived off the
taxpayer all his life. And I guess it is too much to expect from those who
feel a sense of entitlement to reflect on the fact that it is rather
unseemly to be so openly self-serving.